The statements in this section merely provide background information related to the present technology and may not constitute prior art.
Presently, light emitting diodes (LED) are more and more widely used in various electrical/electronic devices. For example, the LED is tending to gradually replace the traditional discharge lamp as the backlight source for liquid crystal display (LCD) devices.
For various application systems that utilize LEDs as backlight sources, it is better to have fault detection, fault protection and/or other functions to enhance system operation reliability. In addition, in application systems using a plurality of LED or LED strings for backlighting, it is desired that the light emitted by the plurality of LED or LED strings are uniform and consistent, which requires that currents flowing through each individual LED or LED string should tend to be balancing and matching. Meanwhile, in various applications, dimming for the LED/LED strings is also desired.